


The Better Man

by semele



Category: Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-04
Updated: 2011-12-04
Packaged: 2017-10-26 21:18:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/288029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/semele/pseuds/semele
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Elena tries to figure out who Damon really is. It doesn't work so well.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Better Man

**Author's Note:**

> Prompted by dante-kent: _Love that will not betray you, dismay or enslave you, it will set you free. Be more like the man you were made to be._

Damon's journal is painfully boring.

Elena finds it in the library in the Boarding House, and it takes her about twenty pages to realize that this is _the_ Damon Salvatore, all neat handwriting and tedious sentences. She starts reading because of sheer disbelief, and after an hour she can't believe she's still doing it to herself; it feels almost like being fascinated by a really bad novel.

“Invading privacy much?”

She is too startled to answer right away, so he just takes the journal from her hands and starts flipping the pages.

“God, why is it still here? This family is just a bunch of pack rats.”

“ _You_ used to write a journal? You?”

“Of course I did. It's a national sport in this town, right next to dying during important festivals.”

“Damon, seriously.”

“Seriously, Elena. I was a kid, my father thought it would be a good excercise. He would read this every week to see how I was doing.”

She half-expects Damon would be at least a bit angry, but no. Instead he simply gives her back the book, walks towards another shelf and starts looking for something.

“Oh, here you are,” he says as he grabs some musty old Hemingway. “Anyway, enjoy yourself, Elena. As far as I remember the writing doesn't get any better. Someone should've just burned this journal ages ago.”

And yet he didn't.

***

Damon is so well-adjusted to living in the modern world it's usually hard to process that he was born before bicycles were invented, but once Elena starts spotting all the small things she is surprised she's never noticed them before; Damon always chooses the right glass when he pours a drink and he is so comfortable in a suit he might as well have been born in one.

(Damon does not care about collateral damage, and he usually needs up to five words to humiliate a person he thinks lower than himself.)

At first it's just funny, a bit like accidentaly finding a picture of your boss when he was seven and dressed up as a koala bear, but the deeper Elena digs the more serious it gets, because she can't explain how did this sweet, innocent boy turn into the Damon she knows. So she reads the journal again and again, she observes and asks questions, and when she finds some old photographs, she grabs them as if they were a long-lost treasure.

She looks through them with Damon and Alaric, pretending that it's pure curiosity on her part, and while Rick is obsessively making notes and asking hundreds of questions, Elena picks up a picture of a young man dressed in a grey uniform; a familiar face changed a little by some strange solemnity.

“Is this how you were before you met Katherine?”, she blurts out without thinking, and Damon looks as if he didn't really understand the question.

“Yeah, I guess. I have no idea, it might've been taken when I was on leave. 1862 or 1864, not sure.”

(This is who he was when he fell in love with Katherine.)

***

After a couple of months it really starts messing with her head, and even though Elena tries to draw a fine line between now and then, the two Damons in her mind look more and more like one and the same person. It's dangerous, she knows it, but she can't help it; she keeps noticing all the glimpses from the past, the human Damon who danced with her and fell in love with her.

(The human Damon who believes that love should be All-or-Nothing.)

“You can be the better man, you know?”, she tells him one night when he gives her a glass of wine. She makes a mental note that the bigger ones go with red; she can never remeber how to serve different kinds of wine.

“Yes, Elena, because this is exactly how it works,” he says impatiently, but then he smiles anyway.

“I mean it, Damon. I can see who you are. I believe in you.”

(When he breaks her neck later this night, he does it in the most caressing fashion.)


End file.
